1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to natural language processing and more particularly to text simplification.
2. Description of the Related Art
Natural language processing is a branch of artificial intelligence that pertains to the analysis, understanding and generation of the languages that humans use naturally in order to interface with computers in both written and spoken contexts using natural human languages instead of computer languages. Natural language processing is a general umbrella term that encompasses many different species of study that range from natural language understanding and speech recognition to part of speech tagging and text extraction. One species of interest under the umbrella of natural language processing is text simplification.
Text simplification pertains to the reduction of modification of text in a textual corpus so as to simplify the corpus of text in terms of grammatical or linguistic complexity, or to merely reduce the size of the corpus of text. Generally, text simplification requires first the parsing of the corpus of text to identify and index the different words of the text, and the replacement or removal of the particular words in the index according to one or more textual simplification rules. In this way, the corpus of text can be simplified to produce either a smaller corpus of text, or at least a simpler corpus of text.